Lifestreaming Pros by Jeremy Wagstaff, Cons by Nicholas Carr, and Lifelogging with Gordon Bell

I just came across this post from Jeremy Wagstaff titled Technology and Getting A Life. I’ve mentioned Jeremy before and he seems to have taken a liking to the Lifestream concept.

Here’s a snip:

But Nicholas is not really talking about that. He’s talking about things called lifestreams – where we nerds create a digital feed of all the things we’re doing, reading or taking photos of and share it with anyone who’s interested

Nicholas (mentioned in the quote above) is Nicholas Carr at The Guardian. Jeremy’s post is somewhat of a rebuttal to this post from Nicholas which takes a few shots at the Lifestreaming concept.

Here’s a snip:

What exactly is behind our rage to document the minutiae of our daily existence? That’s hard to say. Maybe it’s just another manifestation of modern-day narcissism. Maybe it’s a byproduct of our media-saturated culture, with its sense that nothing’s real until it’s been recorded and broadcast. Or maybe it goes deeper than that. In striving to preserve the moments of our lives, to immortalise them, might we simply be expressing our fear of death?

He goes on to say that the sole purpose of companies to provide us with Lifestreaming tools is to better understand how to market to us. Umm…having worked for dotcoms for over 10 years I can tell you that planning how to monetize new tools or content is always a pre-requisite of the new product development process. So I’m not sure what hidden agenda Nicholas thinks he’s uncovered here as this is the normal method of operation for most internet companies. He even goes on to say that Socrates would probably be displeased with this. In any event I’m of the mindset that all publicity (bad or good) is welcomed when creating awareness of Lifestreaming.

As an added bonus Nicholas also made me aware of a recent New Yorker article on Gordon Bell who is considered to be the father of Lifelogging (another term used).

Here’s info on his Lifelog from the article:

Bell’s archive now also contains a hundred and twenty-two thousand e-mails; fifty-eight thousand photographs; thousands of recordings of phone calls he has made; every Web page he has visited and instant-messaging exchange he has conducted since 2003; all the activity of his desktop (which windows, for example, he has opened); eight hundred pages of health records, including information on the life of the battery in his pacemaker; and a sprawling category he describes as “ephemera,” which contains such things as books he has written and books from his library.

It’s a long and interesting article worthy of a read that goes into Bell’s work at Microsoft on Lifelogging and the use of a SenseCam to record first person real-time video.